


Stitch Together

by fluffernutter8



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Steggy Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 09:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17138972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: Peggy and Steve can't leave a particular competition behind in the twentieth century.





	Stitch Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roboticonography](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/gifts).



> A very, very merry Christmas to the best Robot in the biz! I hope you enjoy!!

As with so many things, perhaps the trouble would never have started without Tony’s big mouth.

“Are you knitting over there, Cap?” he asked, too loudly, breaking the quiet that had settled over the jet as they flew back from Australia. Even Peggy and Clint, the furthest away, turned around from the pilot’s controls. “If you wanted upgrades on your suit, you could’ve just asked.”

“It was going to be a Christmas present for you,” Steve said, fingers continuing their consistent movement. “But if that’s your attitude, maybe I should reconsider.”

Tony held up his hands. “Carry on. Should never have stepped in. I’m sure it’s going to be the best…?”

“Sweater,” Steve inserted.

“The best sweater I’ve ever worn.”

Steve said dryly, “Considering that you own a sweater that cost a thousand dollars because it was made from rare yak wool, I wasn’t too worried about the competition,” Tony snapped his gum consideringly, and that would have been that. Except that Peggy had heard the words “best sweater” and her eyes had narrowed.

So it might have been more accurate to say that, as with so many things, perhaps the trouble would never have started if Peggy could pass up a challenge.

* * *

Despite his best efforts not to think about it at all, Steve had spent every visit with Peggy wondering if it would be their last. So he could be forgiven for staring, stunned, for several minutes when she walked into the office he kept at the Tower looking exactly as he remembered her during the war.

“I know that I told you recently that you were always dramatic,” she said, amused, “but you needn’t have taken it as an order.” Then, seeing the way that he leaned back against his desk, his breath catching, she came over and placed a soft hand on his arm.

“It’s alright,” she said, and without making him ask, told him the whole story.

That Peggy wasn’t truly mentally competent at the time to have made the decision to enter the Stark Industries reverse aging trial was something that he would later take up with Tony. Just because she had signed up for it a decade earlier, it didn’t make it alright to go ahead once her cognitive decline had begun. But even as he had marshalled his reasoning for why it was inappropriate, almost unacceptable, he knew that he was, deep down, too illicitly _glad_ to argue well. That Peggy was one of very few candidates to come through at all and the only one to have such a perfect outcome didn’t surprise him exactly (he had known from the first day he’d seen her that she was made of sterner stuff), but it did make him feel luckier.

They ended up talking on the cramped couch in the corner of his office for hours. He had Tony around to occasionally bring up incidents carefully mummified by Howard, or passed down by his Aunt Peggy, but to truly talk to Peggy herself about these things, to have his own memories reflected back by that familiar, consistent sharpness, felt like nearly too much.

When sunset and twilight had long since passed, he finally mentioned, “There’s food downstairs.” She gave him a knowing, fond look that he translated so easily that he wondered if he would cry. “Well, sure, there’s food here too, but it’s not as good.”

“It can’t be worse than what you used to have around,” she said. That was true; keeping extra rations might have been necessary to support his accelerated metabolism, but the serum was certainly the only reason he hadn’t gotten a medical discharge from eating too much of Hitler's secret weapon. But instead of standing to go searching with him, she yawned and reached for the soft handmade afghan he kept on the back of the sofa. “Though I think I might need a bit of a rest before we go scavenging.”

She spread the blanket over herself (“This is nice. I assume that you still consider yourself the superior at knitting?” “That makes it sound like an opinion.”), and a little corner over him, and fell asleep leaning on his shoulder. He stared straight ahead and thought about how she had lived a whole life, that she had had a husband who wasn’t him, raised children, that she’d built SHIELD and run it admirably for decades. It was ridiculous to think that she would even consider a romantic relationship with a barely employed ex-SHIELD contractor who she had kissed once seventy years ago, and it would only make things awkward to ask. He had Peggy, miraculously back with him, and that was all he needed.

* * *

That Christmas Eve, Natasha glanced at the presents under the tree and stopped halfway through her second piece of the chocolate gingerbread cake with which Thor had cheerfully presented everyone. (“Bakery,” Darcy had mouthed from behind him, then, giving up pretense, said, “Do you really think I’d let either of them use a mixer? Jane hasn’t made unburned toast in the entire time I’ve known her. Neither of them could pull off something this good.”)

“Smart of you to avoid tomorrow morning,” Nat said quietly to Sam as he got his bag together to head down to spend Christmas Day at his grandmother’s big house in Maryland.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll know,” she told him, and swallowed the last of her cake. (You never knew the next time you’d get cake.)

But Sam didn’t know, not yet. Because when Tony opened his presents the next day, the gray-violet hooded Aran pullover he received from Steve got only the expected compliments. Steve had given handmade gifts to nearly everyone (a painting for Pepper to hang in the empty space in the guest bedroom that always bothered her, a pair of new throwing knives that he and Thor had worked on together for Natasha) and they had known about the sweater for months. Even when Tony opened his package from Peggy to find a cable knit sweater in navy and light blue with large buttons, it was seen simply as another lovely gift and the overlap chalked up to coincidence or some obscure 1940s tradition.

Only Natasha saw the narrow-eyed glance Steve gave Peggy, and the small, decisive nod.

Even for Nat, it was difficult to tell that anything had changed over the next few months. Steve and Peggy laughed and sparred with each other, recounted old war stories to everyone in the jet or around the Tower, bent their heads together as they planned operations, and noticeably did not knit in public. It was only in May, after their first week of consistently warm weather, that the sound of raised voices drew everyone to the glass-fronted office which Peggy had claimed as her own, where they found Steve saying through clenched teeth, “It was rigged!”

“In what way,” Peggy asked him politely, “do you think I could influence Tony’s wardrobe choices?”

“He wore yours more because he’s scared of you and he knows that you notice everything.”

Peggy turned toward the doorway. “Tony, are you afraid of me?”

“Course I am,” Tony told her promptly. “I used to tell kids on the playground not to mess with me or I’d call my aunt Peg.”

“Flattering as that is, it has no bearing on the question at hand.” She turned back to Steve, her fingertips pressing gently but deliberately into the desktop as she leaned forward. “It’s clear to me, given that my sweater was worn on six more occasions than yours, that Tony considered mine to be more attractive, more comfortable, and of better quality.”

“That doesn’t—” Steve started, but Bruce cut him off.

“Can someone explain what the hell is going on here?” He looked between the two of them. “Are you two really having the first fight I’ve ever seen from you over _sweaters_?”

Peggy and Steve glanced at each other, then turned toward Bruce with mutually crossed arms. “Sweaters,” Peggy said dangerously, “are very important.”

* * *

It hadn’t been the plan for Steve to go on the mission at all. Marcus Harrington - Harry - a more experienced SSR field agent who Peggy had worked with before, had been tapped to join her again. But then Harry had broken a leg during a foot chase, Steve happened to be in London for three days of leave while the Commandos rested up between assignments, and the operation simply couldn’t wait.

Steve and Peggy had rescued the captive SSR operative fairly easily - he was still being dragged by a small group of soldiers through the woods back toward an established Nazi base when they found him - but returning him to where he needed to be proved more difficult. Finland was never exactly _hot_ , but they had picked a particularly terrible week to be outdoors. Steve would often sit with his broad back facing into the cutting breeze in an attempt to act as a windbreak. But finally they managed to get him to the safehouse, enduring with embarrassment the effusive thanks of the two sisters and multiple Resistance friends already there.

“Let us give you something to thank you!” someone said, and Steve and Peggy accepted, hoping that this could serve as an appropriate endpoint to the conversation in the way that their protestations that it really was only their job had not.

Food supplies being what they were, it took a bit of time to find something deemed suitable as a gift. Finally a skein of cream yarn and a pair of knitting needles were handed to them, a final round of thanks was exchanged, and Steve and Peggy set back on their way to their pickup point.

The driving snow that cut them off miles from where they were meant to be was a problem. The small and broken shed they found to shelter in was an absolute miracle. Except that, after several hours of forgetting propriety - Steve leaning toward Peggy, or she leaning toward him, to share his warmth - and then abruptly remembering it again, they were both absolutely, incredibly bored.

Steve hadn’t remembered the yarn, exactly, but when he encountered it after sticking a hand in his pocket, it was a relief.

“I can show you a couple of stitches,” he offered Peggy idly, and she looked at him and asked, “What makes you think that I don’t know your ‘couple of stitches,’ and more than you do besides?”

“You’re already a codebreaker and a crack shot,” Steve pointed out. “Where would you find the time to learn to knit too?”

As she soon showed him, she _made_ the time. But Steve, who had gained his own skills during long winters (and autumns, and summers) in bed, guided by the few knitting books available from the public library, was for once determined to hold his own. In anything else he accepted Peggy’s superiority as a matter of course, but in this he refused to yield.

When the pilot asked how they had passed the time waiting for the storm to clear, they both answered, without looking at each other, “Talked.” But a personal battle had been declared, and neither party was willing to back down.

* * *

Although Tony congratulated them on their attempt at experimental design, he had to admit that “proximity to hand as he reached into closet” was too significant a factor in his getting dressed to have made it a fair competition between them. New parameters would have to be set.

“Your criteria were a problem. Best sweater is too broad and too subjective, and you didn’t take weather or occasion into account,” Pepper told them. “The sweater you want to wear for a cozy day in the house isn’t necessarily the sweater you want to wear shoveling the driveway, or to work, and it’s practically impossible to make a sweater that fits all of those needs.”

It became quickly apparent that there were too many facets to consider. Half the room was stewing in stumped silence, while the other half talked over each other with suggestions. Finally it was Clint, who had walked in midway through the argument, who said through the slice of pizza he’d crammed into his mouth, “Ugliest.”

The new competition now took shape. The guidelines would not be which was the most attractive or most comfortable, which showed the most advanced technique or held up best in the wash, but instead who could make the ugliest sweater.

“It has to be wearable,” Natasha ticked off. “And the deadline is this Christmas morning.”

Those were the only rules.

* * *

That Peggy and Steve retreat to opposite corners and refuse to speak for the six months of competition seemed the next logical step. But they had been happily at war with each other for six months already, and saw no need to let the renewal of hostilities interfere with their relationship now.

If anything, they grew closer. Now that Steve had no reason to base himself out of DC, he had decided to find himself another, less depressing New York apartment, and masochistically asked if Peggy would like to be his roommate. (If he could see Peggy fixing the garbage disposal, or accusing him of eating all of her favorite breakfast cereal, or with disheveled hair finding something to watch on TV, he swore to himself that now it would be enough.) Peggy recognized with some sadness that after nearly dying, acclimating to all the losses of an entirely new century, and spending time with her elderly self, Steve was too battered for a relationship and certainly could not view her in a romantic light. She was also past ready to move out of the Tower. She accepted.

They were good roommates. Their parents would have been scandalized. A schedule was devised for making sure the bathroom was kept clean, and they agreed that if one was making food, they would always make enough for both of them. (This quickly turned into a promise to order in enough for both of them, as their stove remained mostly unused.) Peggy snuck a pair of nicely fitted jeans into Steve’s wardrobe. He bought her a gun safe that matched the red accents of her cream-painted bedroom. They mutually agreed to cancel the History Channel on their television package, but found themselves sharing the sofa often at the end of the day, flipping through the options and bickering over what self-indulgent program to choose.

And in the evenings, they would part, each to their separate bedroom to work on their creations.

Darcy passed Peggy’s office one afternoon when Steve was away and poked her head inside. “If you’re in the apartment anyway, why don’t you just, like, burn his yarn supply? Or at least sneak a peek at what he’s working on?” she asked.

“Well, that would hardly be sporting,” said Peggy, letting the screen scroll through some documents in front of her as her hands kept up her stitching. “And it’s certainly unnecessary. I will beat him, as always, through pure talent.”

Steve was equally confident. “You don’t spend a few years making your own clothes by taking apart charity castoffs and not gain some useful skills,” he told Sam as they headed back on another flight, this one commercial, following a lead in one of the HYDRA files. His needles clicked as he spoke; somehow Steve was never questioned about them at security.

“Considering what you’re competing for, I don’t know if those skills are something to brag about,” Sam commented, and Steve shut up and stewed.

Though the cordiality - which was by this point their hallmark - remained through their shared Thanksgiving and into the beginning of December, there were some cracks starting to show. They shared an open glare during a conversation about strategy which certainly did not merit such anger, and their training sessions in the Avengers gym, which typically had a graceful, mythic quality, were taking on a vicious angle. Yet somehow, even as they shopped for gifts and put on their finishing touches, their time together at the end of the day remained sacrosanct. Neither was willing to give it up. The possibility was never even mentioned.

* * *

Sam arranged to do Christmas Eve in the city and then leave again for Christmas itself with his family. As he put it, he was too smart to keep himself in the line of fire.

“It’s like my mother always said,” he told Pepper as they all stood around the Tower drinking eggnog and pretending not to look with trepidation at the gifts beneath the tree. “‘It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,’ and I plan to get to New Years with the same two I was born with.”

The point was astute. Most of the fun to the competition had slowly worn away, and it somehow seemed to be standing in for proof of something more serious yet unnamed. Still, everyone opened their gifts on the next morning with passable glee, poking at new gadgets and passing thanks around.

No one got further knitwear, which helped.

Finally, the two packages were brought forward. Peggy and Steve took politeness to another level, each insisting that the other go first for so long that - after Tony realized he didn’t exactly carry change - Darcy took out a quarter and flipped it.

The pride Steve had in his creation was understandable. He had clearly been exploring fashions of the 1980s at some point recently, which were recreated in the shape of the...garment (calling it a sweater seemed dangerous and insulting). The shoulders of it were so enormously padded as to be nearly square, and the base color - a vivid and horrible metallic red, with accompanying sequins - was easy to imagine tossed by the skein into the bargain bin. The stripes of silver and green glittery fur yarn gave the entire thing the impression of either a tinsel-covered candy cane or some of the more disturbing types of mold. But it was in the notions department that Steve had truly outdone himself, choosing beads in the shapes of Christmas bells, buttons molded to look like holly berries and leaves, and bows in all sizes, colors, and textures to spangle across his creation without pattern or logic.

There was a moment of silence as he unveiled it. The true hideousness of it needed to be mourned upon sight.

“Okay, maybe it is a real contest,” Tony said, a little awed. He dared only look at Peggy from the corner of his eye; he had enough memories of her steaming when she had been upset with his father, and he didn’t need new ones.

But Peggy, when she brought her own box forward, was calm. If Steve had gone for the more traditional route of unattractiveness through overwhelming the eye, Peggy had decided on a subtler, more simple strategy. The sweater in itself had something of an ersatz quality to it - it was made too wide, so that it somewhat resembled a poncho or a sweater cape, and the snowflakes decorating the hem were lopsided and angular - but it was as the eye drew upward that the true knockout came.

Jane, who was a little tipsy, began to giggle. So did Pepper, who wasn’t.

“Oh,” said Bruce. “Oh, wow. Oh no.”

And he might have summed it up the best. For what Peggy had attached to the front of her entry were two mock reindeer faces: plush, tan appendages stuffed presumably with batting, little red noses on the ends and antlers above the tops. She had even included tiny stitched smiles on the lower curves, and sewn on button eyes.

They were placed directly on the chest so as to mimic two nude, decorated breasts.

“Comment cards can be found on the table for easy tallying,” she said generously.

For a moment nobody moved, struck not by an enemy but by the terrible, impossible choice before them. Then, into the silence, Natasha said, “There’s something else under the tree.”

And she reached for a final time beneath the tree, pulling something from the hidden back branches. She set the box in her lap, and slowly lifted the lid...

* * *

As they walked home, Steve kept glancing at Peggy when they passed under streetlights. He was enchanted by the color the cold was bringing to her face, a blush in her cheeks and a rosy tip to her nose.

“I had no idea that Father Christmas could be so frightening,” she was saying, and he forced himself back into the conversation and agreed.

“It was bad even with those little lights in his eyes off, but when she turned them on...” He gave a shudder.

Seeing the third, and most disturbing, take on the contest prompt, a draw had been declared, and the afternoon had progressed with food, classic Christmas movies, and the traditional British crackers which Jarvis had ordered specially for Peggy. Only when it had darkened did everyone begin to drift out, including Peggy and Steve, getting a chance to speak on their own for the first time since the morning.

“We both put up a good fight,” Steve said as they reached their block. “Truce?” He put out his hand. Peggy took it and shook easily.

“It really was marvelous fun, and you were a worthy competitor.” They took a moment to wave to their neighbor, Mr. Travellini, as he put his cat out. “I’m only sorry that I was so caught up in the whole affair that I neglected to get you a gift.”

Steve was already shaking his head. “Not like I got one for you, either. And besides, I have all the gifts I need.”

She had climbed one step to their building before she had turned back to look at him. In the warm beam of the streetlights as snow began to drift down around them, his scarf draped indifferently around his neck and his eyes glowed up at her, just like the boy she remembered.

 _Oh_ , she thought, as she always had when faced with that gaze. _Oh, my._

She wondered if he had become better at hiding the look, or if she had just been too caught up in her own logic, her own assumptions, to see it.

“Steve,” she asked, placing a careful hand on his shoulder. “Steve, are you ever going to kiss me?”

His mouth parted just a bit, an amazed kind of confusion on his face. “I thought—” He swallowed. “I thought you wouldn’t want me to.”

“Well,” she said practically, “I absolutely do. And you’ve just said that you owe me a gift.” With her on the step, they were of a height. All it would take was the tiniest lean forward...

Steve might have been more practiced at knitting than he was at kissing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t give a perfectly lovely present.


End file.
